How do we know what is important to our customers and those we wish to do business with? This is the $64,000 question. In survey research especially that which focuses on consumer or B2B marketing research this question becomes even more critical in these slow-growth economic times. This line of thinking can also be applied internally in the form of an employee attitude survey.

As with most approaches in market research there are multiple paths we can take to reach an answer. I received a survey recently that followed an interesting approach. Although it was not novel by any means it will provide interesting input into the survey data analysis.

The rank ordering of key dimensions is where we begin. In the survey mentioned previously, I was asked to rank 20 marketing activities based upon my perceived importance to the organization. The task involved selecting groups of tasks and assigning them to buckets (very important, important, somewhat important, not very important, and not important at all). There was a limit of five tasks that could be place in any bucket. Whether or not to set such a limit is something the researcher will have to consider.

After ranking the tasks according to my perceived level of importance I was then asked to rate my company’s performance on each of these tasks. This allows the researcher to obtain both perceived importance of a task and the respondent’s attitudes toward the execution on that task. This approach could easily be adapted to consumer and B2B studies looking at the performance of a company or product and the associated competitor positions.

Some online survey platforms allow the researcher the opportunity to create a visual approach where the respondent drags the dimension into a specific bucket. This aids with visual appeal and can increase engagement with the study. At the end of the day the researcher will have data that provides both perceived importance of critical business dimensions and a rating of the company’s (and possibly competitors) actual performance. This can be sliced in several ways depending upon the classification questions asked.